I have a sandisk mp3 player and while it basically meets my needs the interface is crap. I've had the thing for almost 2 years and there's still functionality I can't figure out even after reading the instruction manual. The beauty of the iPod is it's ease of use, and until someone has a product that competes at that level the iPod will remain king.
Like so many technical terms that get throw around in the web world, Web 2.0's meaning changes depending on if you're asking techies, suits or the media. It's not a strictly defined term anyway like Ajax, but from a technical standpoint I'd say you're correct, Web 2.0 means web sites that function more like standard applications through the use of technologies like Ajax. On the business side the term refers to those companies that are just emerging as the first wave of successful web companies after the dot com bust. The media uses it in such a way that can refer to either of these and also to the reinvigoration of the web community on both the technical side and the entrepreneurial side after a long slump following the bust.
Newsflash, you need to take a basic economics course. I also worked for a couple of video game magazine publish houses, and the parent post is spot on. The reason only 20% of the magazines sell is that video game magazines by there very nature tend to be impulse purchases. Its not like newspapers where you can get a pretty good meassure of how many are going to be bought at a specific place on a specific day. For those buyers that aren't so dedicated they'll subscribe, the only way to reach them is to make sure the magazine is available when the impulse strikes them, and that means dumping a lot of copies out there so they are always available to potential buyers even if you only sell a small percentage. That keeps your numbers up, and that keeps your advertisers happy. Since advertising is what keeps you in business that allows you to be able to keep your doors open. This isn't anything unique to video game magazines either, most magazines are funded by advertising. I read Wired and Spin occasionaly and they're packed with ads. My wife's copy of Vouge smells like it has more pages of perfume samples then actual content. Of the magazines I read it seems the Economist and Scientific American are the only ones that aren't packed with ads, and these two are closer to the newspaper model with a large fixed readership that isn't so dependant on advertising cash.
Walking on fire has nothing to do with the power of the mind. I'm assuming you're talking about the old walking on coals trick. The secret is that coals aren't a very good conducter, and as such don't pass their heat onto the walkers feat very well in the brief time that they're in contact. If you were to place a metal sheet on top of the coals and have someone walk across that, well, you'd be in for a very different show.
Actually you had to worry about that a lot. The First Folio was published after Shakespear's death by a group of his friends to help combat just that, and to cut down on the business of bad copies of his manuscripts being made. These things were great, imagine Hamlet re-written by the folks that make those howlingly bad subtitle for pirated chinese DVDs and you'll get the idea. Of course Will himself freely listed plots, characters and whole lines from his contemporaries, so who to say who would have benifited more from elizabethian copyright protection.
Not really. That might have been the case when you actually needed to know something to be a "hacker", but this kid is just downloading tools from other places. I doubt he knows what TCP/IP is.
Which Pixar film do you think was being snubbed? The Incredibles was the last Pixar film to be released, it was released in '04, and happened to win the Best animated feature film of the year oscar that year.
Yeah, http://www.iftf.org/they sound like a real bunch of nutjobs. A silicon vally organization that tries to predict future trends my analyzing technical change. What will we crazy Californians think of next.
You know, that theory still doesn't hold water for me. The way the German tax loophole worked (I say worked because it was recently closed) was this. The studios would sell a movie to a German holding company for, say 100 million, and then the holding company would lease the movie back to the studio for, say 90 million. Why would they be willing to lose 10 million on the deal? Because the money they put up is considered a capital investment under the old German tax law, and isn't taxable until it turns a profit, so instead of losing 40% of that money to taxes they only lose 10%. It's free money for both parties, but the thing to keep in mind is that it's completely removed from the actual box office receipts. It doesn't matter if the movie is a hit or tanks, the amounts are decided long before the movie is released, and no matter what happened the holding company always "loses" it's 10%, and the risk is still on the studios shoulders with just a little extra padding because of the loophole.
So how does Boll exactly benefit from this? His movies are too low budget to benefit from this shell game, studios like doing this with big budget movies because it benefits from an economy of scale. Trying to make a $1 million off of a $10 million dollar movie doesn't work as well because too much of the profit margin gets eaten up with lawyer fees and the like. BloodRayne is his biggest budget film yet, and from what I can see it's right around $20 million which is not enough. German investors aren't going to directly invest in his films if they don't return at least 60% of their investment, and I don't think any of them have. I'm still voting on blackmail polaroids of various studio executives as the most likely explanation.
If a few dozen kids hitting refresh for a few hours brought down my webserver I'd take it as a sign I need a better set-up. I'm surpised it was even detectable, the school's site must be hosted on an Apple 2.
Isn't he the researcher that every free-energy, perpetual motion or levitation nutjob snake oil salesman sites? I don't know if his theories hold water or not, but mentioning his name is a big red flag for me.
Agreed, although I never liked Civ 3 all that much either. I was a huge fan of Civ 1 & 2, but my true love is SMAC, I still play a game every couple of monthes. I've gone through a few games of Civ 4 and it's not really doing it for me. Some of my problems are technical, my system just barely meets the minimum specs so it crawls and the early game consists of me waiting 15 seconds for the turn to complete so I can hit the enter key over and over again, but I also don't really like the feel of the game. It's hard for me to put my finger on, but it just doesn't feel "epic" to me. The maps are smaller, you have fewer cities, your armies are smaller, the wonder movies are lame, tech advances give you a sentance from Spock but nothing else to make it feel like an achievment, and when you destroy an enemy civalization all you get is a sentance in the corner of the screen that's easy to miss. No throne room or castle to make, no advisors calling you "My liege" (ok, some, but it's just annoying pop-up hints that you'll disable after the first game). The over all design just feels smaller too. I never feel like I'm Alexander or Grant or Patton when I'm on the warpath. When I'm waging a WWII tech level war against a civ my same size, I want to feel like my forces are sweeping across the ocean to invade a distant continent. Instead it feels like I'm shoving a handful of tanks into a couple of boats and invading Haiti from Cuba. I can understand that they wanted to grab a more mainstream gamer audience and reduce the complexity of the underlying game, but I want a combination of more complexity and slicked up game presentation. It's one of the reasons I've never switched to console gaming because I enjoy the complexity possible in pc games more. Micromangement sucks, but am I crazy in thinking they could create a more complex civ game and spend some time really thinking about automation options that would minimize that micromanagement, rather then shrinking the entire scope of the game? Unfortunatly turn based games are almost dead at this point, but I for one would gladly give money to someone willing to give it a try.
Well, YMMV, but MythTV works great in our house. I've been running it for a little over 2 years now, and while it has had a couple of instances of downtime I wouldn't trade it for any commercial product I've seen. Not only does it work great in it's TiVo like capacity with 200+ hours of recording time, but it intigrates flawlessly with my mp3 collection, allowing us to play all of our music through the same device, and the ROM emulation allows me to play old Atari games in front of my tv like it was '85 all over again. If I see an article on slashdot about a show I want to record, I've got a handy web interface to set up the recording from work. The wife loves it, and has told me repeatedly that she couldn't live without it anymore. I'm already planning a super system upgrade to throw in multiple tuner cards in a centralized server so we can watch our shows from any tv or computer in the house. That being said, I'm recommending that my Mom get a Tivo. I love my MythTV, but it does take some patience/skills that she doesn't have, and as her defacto tech support, I don't want to deal with it either.
It's a real shape that that Clone Wars wasn't more widely available before Episode 3 came out, as I think it's required viewing to really get the full enjoyment out of the movie. All of Grevious's character development was in it, and he comes off as a real bad ass. The foreshodowing of Anni's fall was also very nicely done. Hell, I think it's better then all 3 of the movies. The animation style kept the action very tightly focused, and the fights felt a lot more personal because of it. None of the wall of digital effects slamming into you to distract you that Lucas seems so fond of.
I'm excited about both of the projects and I'm planning on going to a midnight showing Serenity tomorrow. The most interesting part of this though is the fundamental shift in the entertainment industry that both of these movies represent. "Movie" studios have been firmly taken over by their DVD divisions. There have been a lot of comments here asking why Firefly was given a movie deal after being seen as such a failure for Fox. The answer, it sold a boatload of DVDs, and Universal is counting less on a succesful theatrical release then they are on selling another boatload when it comes out on DVD. Plus, the markeing campaign for the movie acts as marketing for the existing DVD set, increasing sales there as well. Mirrormask, as someone else pointed out, was produced to be sort of a spiritual successor to the Dark Crystal and Labrynth, 2 movies that didn't have very successful theatrical releases but proved to have very long legs in the DVD sale market. I think these releases are really interesting becasue I think the studios are floating these out there as a test of a new business model, and if these movies spawn lucrative DVD releases, I think we're goign to see some major shifts in movie releases: a shortening of the window between theatrical and DVD releases, an increased emphasis on studio releases straight to the customer like home viewing of downloaded content (which might be great news for the BitTorrent guys if they can become the defacro transmission protocol) and eventually the death of the movie theater as we know it. These ideas of where the business is heading certainly aren't new, but these are the first releases I've seen that look like their number one goal is DVD sales and the theatrical release is secondary.
What I want to know is
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
Can I have back that half a GPA point the first Civ cost me and the half a point Civ 2 cost me? You can have the girlfriend Alpha Centauri cost me, she wasn't that great anyway. I would like a new version of Alpha Centauri though, any thoughts on when that might be happening?
Didn't make it this year, but last year we constructed a poetry reciting robot for our camp. the servo controls and speach synthesis were all done through an old 486 we stashed in the beast's chest and completly run on open source/custom code. Burning Man is a great test of what you can do with slavaged tech, as you really don't want to take anything up there that you'll be afraid to lose, and you really haven't lived until you've done a Slackware install and troubleshot a pile of perl code in the middle of a 70 mile an hour windstorm with 6 inches of visibility. We never did figure out why the damn thing would always crash halfway through Dante's Inferno.
How about professional software engineers who can't troubleshoot Windows machines. I always get a "why did I pay for college?" gasp of exasperation when this comes up with my Mom.
How did this get branded a liberal thing? The producers wanted to do a series focused on health, thought that this would be an important issue to discuss, and went forward with it. Sure Hillary Clinton appeared on Sesame Street during that series, but then so did Bill Frist. PBS has explicitly stated that they weren't pressured to make the change, and even if they had, the pressure would have most likely come from the "Security Mom" demographic, who overwhelmingly voted for Bush.
If you're wondering what filesystem your Freevo box is running, what it does on boot, or what all those nifty files in the bin directory do, you probably shouldn't be running it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a sandisk mp3 player and while it basically meets my needs the interface is crap. I've had the thing for almost 2 years and there's still functionality I can't figure out even after reading the instruction manual. The beauty of the iPod is it's ease of use, and until someone has a product that competes at that level the iPod will remain king.
Like so many technical terms that get throw around in the web world, Web 2.0's meaning changes depending on if you're asking techies, suits or the media. It's not a strictly defined term anyway like Ajax, but from a technical standpoint I'd say you're correct, Web 2.0 means web sites that function more like standard applications through the use of technologies like Ajax. On the business side the term refers to those companies that are just emerging as the first wave of successful web companies after the dot com bust. The media uses it in such a way that can refer to either of these and also to the reinvigoration of the web community on both the technical side and the entrepreneurial side after a long slump following the bust.
Newsflash, you need to take a basic economics course. I also worked for a couple of video game magazine publish houses, and the parent post is spot on. The reason only 20% of the magazines sell is that video game magazines by there very nature tend to be impulse purchases. Its not like newspapers where you can get a pretty good meassure of how many are going to be bought at a specific place on a specific day. For those buyers that aren't so dedicated they'll subscribe, the only way to reach them is to make sure the magazine is available when the impulse strikes them, and that means dumping a lot of copies out there so they are always available to potential buyers even if you only sell a small percentage. That keeps your numbers up, and that keeps your advertisers happy. Since advertising is what keeps you in business that allows you to be able to keep your doors open. This isn't anything unique to video game magazines either, most magazines are funded by advertising. I read Wired and Spin occasionaly and they're packed with ads. My wife's copy of Vouge smells like it has more pages of perfume samples then actual content. Of the magazines I read it seems the Economist and Scientific American are the only ones that aren't packed with ads, and these two are closer to the newspaper model with a large fixed readership that isn't so dependant on advertising cash.
Walking on fire has nothing to do with the power of the mind. I'm assuming you're talking about the old walking on coals trick. The secret is that coals aren't a very good conducter, and as such don't pass their heat onto the walkers feat very well in the brief time that they're in contact. If you were to place a metal sheet on top of the coals and have someone walk across that, well, you'd be in for a very different show.
Actually you had to worry about that a lot. The First Folio was published after Shakespear's death by a group of his friends to help combat just that, and to cut down on the business of bad copies of his manuscripts being made. These things were great, imagine Hamlet re-written by the folks that make those howlingly bad subtitle for pirated chinese DVDs and you'll get the idea. Of course Will himself freely listed plots, characters and whole lines from his contemporaries, so who to say who would have benifited more from elizabethian copyright protection.
Not really. That might have been the case when you actually needed to know something to be a "hacker", but this kid is just downloading tools from other places. I doubt he knows what TCP/IP is.
Which Pixar film do you think was being snubbed? The Incredibles was the last Pixar film to be released, it was released in '04, and happened to win the Best animated feature film of the year oscar that year.
Oh boy do I agree. I still fire that one up every other month or so.
Yeah, http://www.iftf.org/they sound like a real bunch of nutjobs. A silicon vally organization that tries to predict future trends my analyzing technical change. What will we crazy Californians think of next.
You know, that theory still doesn't hold water for me. The way the German tax loophole worked (I say worked because it was recently closed) was this. The studios would sell a movie to a German holding company for, say 100 million, and then the holding company would lease the movie back to the studio for, say 90 million. Why would they be willing to lose 10 million on the deal? Because the money they put up is considered a capital investment under the old German tax law, and isn't taxable until it turns a profit, so instead of losing 40% of that money to taxes they only lose 10%. It's free money for both parties, but the thing to keep in mind is that it's completely removed from the actual box office receipts. It doesn't matter if the movie is a hit or tanks, the amounts are decided long before the movie is released, and no matter what happened the holding company always "loses" it's 10%, and the risk is still on the studios shoulders with just a little extra padding because of the loophole.
So how does Boll exactly benefit from this? His movies are too low budget to benefit from this shell game, studios like doing this with big budget movies because it benefits from an economy of scale. Trying to make a $1 million off of a $10 million dollar movie doesn't work as well because too much of the profit margin gets eaten up with lawyer fees and the like. BloodRayne is his biggest budget film yet, and from what I can see it's right around $20 million which is not enough. German investors aren't going to directly invest in his films if they don't return at least 60% of their investment, and I don't think any of them have. I'm still voting on blackmail polaroids of various studio executives as the most likely explanation.
If a few dozen kids hitting refresh for a few hours brought down my webserver I'd take it as a sign I need a better set-up. I'm surpised it was even detectable, the school's site must be hosted on an Apple 2.
Isn't he the researcher that every free-energy, perpetual motion or levitation nutjob snake oil salesman sites? I don't know if his theories hold water or not, but mentioning his name is a big red flag for me.
Agreed, although I never liked Civ 3 all that much either. I was a huge fan of Civ 1 & 2, but my true love is SMAC, I still play a game every couple of monthes. I've gone through a few games of Civ 4 and it's not really doing it for me. Some of my problems are technical, my system just barely meets the minimum specs so it crawls and the early game consists of me waiting 15 seconds for the turn to complete so I can hit the enter key over and over again, but I also don't really like the feel of the game. It's hard for me to put my finger on, but it just doesn't feel "epic" to me. The maps are smaller, you have fewer cities, your armies are smaller, the wonder movies are lame, tech advances give you a sentance from Spock but nothing else to make it feel like an achievment, and when you destroy an enemy civalization all you get is a sentance in the corner of the screen that's easy to miss. No throne room or castle to make, no advisors calling you "My liege" (ok, some, but it's just annoying pop-up hints that you'll disable after the first game). The over all design just feels smaller too. I never feel like I'm Alexander or Grant or Patton when I'm on the warpath. When I'm waging a WWII tech level war against a civ my same size, I want to feel like my forces are sweeping across the ocean to invade a distant continent. Instead it feels like I'm shoving a handful of tanks into a couple of boats and invading Haiti from Cuba. I can understand that they wanted to grab a more mainstream gamer audience and reduce the complexity of the underlying game, but I want a combination of more complexity and slicked up game presentation. It's one of the reasons I've never switched to console gaming because I enjoy the complexity possible in pc games more. Micromangement sucks, but am I crazy in thinking they could create a more complex civ game and spend some time really thinking about automation options that would minimize that micromanagement, rather then shrinking the entire scope of the game? Unfortunatly turn based games are almost dead at this point, but I for one would gladly give money to someone willing to give it a try.
Well, YMMV, but MythTV works great in our house. I've been running it for a little over 2 years now, and while it has had a couple of instances of downtime I wouldn't trade it for any commercial product I've seen. Not only does it work great in it's TiVo like capacity with 200+ hours of recording time, but it intigrates flawlessly with my mp3 collection, allowing us to play all of our music through the same device, and the ROM emulation allows me to play old Atari games in front of my tv like it was '85 all over again. If I see an article on slashdot about a show I want to record, I've got a handy web interface to set up the recording from work. The wife loves it, and has told me repeatedly that she couldn't live without it anymore. I'm already planning a super system upgrade to throw in multiple tuner cards in a centralized server so we can watch our shows from any tv or computer in the house. That being said, I'm recommending that my Mom get a Tivo. I love my MythTV, but it does take some patience/skills that she doesn't have, and as her defacto tech support, I don't want to deal with it either.
It's a real shape that that Clone Wars wasn't more widely available before Episode 3 came out, as I think it's required viewing to really get the full enjoyment out of the movie. All of Grevious's character development was in it, and he comes off as a real bad ass. The foreshodowing of Anni's fall was also very nicely done. Hell, I think it's better then all 3 of the movies. The animation style kept the action very tightly focused, and the fights felt a lot more personal because of it. None of the wall of digital effects slamming into you to distract you that Lucas seems so fond of.
I'm excited about both of the projects and I'm planning on going to a midnight showing Serenity tomorrow. The most interesting part of this though is the fundamental shift in the entertainment industry that both of these movies represent. "Movie" studios have been firmly taken over by their DVD divisions. There have been a lot of comments here asking why Firefly was given a movie deal after being seen as such a failure for Fox. The answer, it sold a boatload of DVDs, and Universal is counting less on a succesful theatrical release then they are on selling another boatload when it comes out on DVD. Plus, the markeing campaign for the movie acts as marketing for the existing DVD set, increasing sales there as well. Mirrormask, as someone else pointed out, was produced to be sort of a spiritual successor to the Dark Crystal and Labrynth, 2 movies that didn't have very successful theatrical releases but proved to have very long legs in the DVD sale market. I think these releases are really interesting becasue I think the studios are floating these out there as a test of a new business model, and if these movies spawn lucrative DVD releases, I think we're goign to see some major shifts in movie releases: a shortening of the window between theatrical and DVD releases, an increased emphasis on studio releases straight to the customer like home viewing of downloaded content (which might be great news for the BitTorrent guys if they can become the defacro transmission protocol) and eventually the death of the movie theater as we know it. These ideas of where the business is heading certainly aren't new, but these are the first releases I've seen that look like their number one goal is DVD sales and the theatrical release is secondary.
Can I have back that half a GPA point the first Civ cost me and the half a point Civ 2 cost me? You can have the girlfriend Alpha Centauri cost me, she wasn't that great anyway. I would like a new version of Alpha Centauri though, any thoughts on when that might be happening?
Didn't make it this year, but last year we constructed a poetry reciting robot for our camp. the servo controls and speach synthesis were all done through an old 486 we stashed in the beast's chest and completly run on open source/custom code. Burning Man is a great test of what you can do with slavaged tech, as you really don't want to take anything up there that you'll be afraid to lose, and you really haven't lived until you've done a Slackware install and troubleshot a pile of perl code in the middle of a 70 mile an hour windstorm with 6 inches of visibility. We never did figure out why the damn thing would always crash halfway through Dante's Inferno.
How about professional software engineers who can't troubleshoot Windows machines. I always get a "why did I pay for college?" gasp of exasperation when this comes up with my Mom.
How did this get branded a liberal thing? The producers wanted to do a series focused on health, thought that this would be an important issue to discuss, and went forward with it. Sure Hillary Clinton appeared on Sesame Street during that series, but then so did Bill Frist. PBS has explicitly stated that they weren't pressured to make the change, and even if they had, the pressure would have most likely come from the "Security Mom" demographic, who overwhelmingly voted for Bush.
If you're wondering what filesystem your Freevo box is running, what it does on boot, or what all those nifty files in the bin directory do, you probably shouldn't be running it.